For the street children of the Honduran capital, Tegucigalpa, escape comes in two ways. The first is by way of a solvent-based glue called Resistol which they inhale to induce a four-hour long high.

But there is a more final exit that the street children dread - murder at the hands of the city's so-called 'death cars' and dumped in skips, dustbins and ditches.

It is not just the street children, who beg and sell their bodies on the streets of Honduras, who are victims. Other youths too are victims of a social cleansing that is sanctioned by a large proportion of the country's society.

They are Honduras's tattooed gang members with affiliations to the Los Angeles gangland. They are the number one enemy of the country's literate classes, denounced by politicians and in the media, and exterminated by police and private death squads.

Some 700 children have died in the last two years, according to Amnesty International which has been running a campaign against child murder in Honduras.

And some of these killings have been on a large scale. The latest took place on 17 May when 105 prisoners, largely young gang members with the Mara Salvatrucha gang, were locked into the El Porvenir prison in the textile-producing city of San Pedro Sula and burned alive.

It follows a similar mass killing at La Ceiba in northern Honduras last year when 51 members of the 18th Street gang were summarily shot, and their wing set on fire.

But while it has been the prison fires that have drawn the most attention, it is the constant attrition against the country's youth that is still alarming Amnesty.

Darwin Roberto Sacuceda Flores dreamed of becoming a doctor and was good at school, but that all changed when he joined the 18th Street gang at the age of 14. Two years later he was dead.

Sara Sacuceda Flores believes the police executed her son. 'Darwin met a girl from the 18th Street gang at a party,' Sara, 39, remembers. 'The gang was a new world. They promised clothes, shoes, gold chains and the chance to be a leader, a boss.

'But it was all a lie. When you start, the gang gives you a better identity, but when you try to get out you can't. He had "18" tattooed on his chin, and his arms were full of tattoos. He took cocaine and alcohol, and they robbed to get what they needed.'

Darwin got into frequent trouble with the police and went to prison several times. He was arrested for the last time on 14 February 2002 and released two days later. He frightened his mother with gloomy premonitions. 'He said he would die soon, that the police would kill him.'

He died the next day. 'The police let him go, but then they came back and killed him,' Sara said. 'There are witnesses, but they are afraid to speak out. The police are blaming the killing on the gang, but it's not true.

'Our government is repressive and they let the police act with impunity. There is no rehabilitation, they just arrest our kids and throw them into prison and they come out more aggressive. The courts in our country don't treat their deaths seriously because these are kids with social problems.'

The assault on Honduras's street children and gang members is part of the country's mano duro (strong hand) policies, inspired by the zero tolerance approach of New York in the Nineties.

Those policies were introduced by President Ricardo Maduro, who has converted zero tolerance into an anti-gang campaign that has stigmatised every youth with a tattoo and resulted in widespread human rights abuses.

And while children in poverty-stricken Honduras are responsible for criminality, it is a tiny proportion of the problem ascribed to gang members. Their activities, however, have been inflated and compared with a terrorist assault on the state.

According to Amnesty International's 2003 report on Honduras, a 1999 study undertaken by the Honduran Institute for Children and the Family noted that only 0.02 per cent of all murders committed in Honduras were attributable to minors. The Honduran government itself has accepted that juvenile delinquency accounts for only around 5 per cent of the country's crimes.

Against this background Amnesty launched its latest report on child killings in Honduras last week. It acknowledges that Honduras's Special Unit for the Investigation of Violent Deaths of Children has made some progress, but since its creation has looked at only 400 of more than 2,300 killings of children since January 1998. Only 88 cases were forwarded to the Attorney General's Office, and just three have resulted in a conviction.

Although the government has admitted police have been involved in many of the killings, only two officers have so far been convicted.

'Thousands of children in Honduras face a similar fate to Darwin,' said Kate Allen, UK director of Amnesty International. 'The Honduran authorities must prevent and punish killings of children and youths in the country, and protect witnesses.

'The government should appoint ad hoc judges to work specifically on these cases. The future of the country depends on it.'